some pros and cons of corel painter 2018

Maybe it's because I'm used to it after using it for so long, but I think this is actually an improvement over how it used to be a couple versions ago.

Basically, you have a few hierarchies. You have those fly-out panels (the light gray), which are attached to the brush control bar at the top of the screen. They are the main settings you will commonly be adjusting for each brush, placed there to make them easy to access. They also give you shortcuts to the more in-depth brush control palettes.

The darker gray panels are the various brush control palettes. These are *numerous* and except for people who are really knowledgeable of Painter's brush engines, I would recommend staying away from those for the most part (with the exception of accessing them through the Advanced Brush Controls option--I'll explain below).

The 'header with title' is a grouping of palettes. These are actually a nice addition because you can take any brush control palettes you want and group them together that way. You can also collapse them by double clicking the heading bar, which was something Painter needed for a *long* time. That little gear icon at the top-right lets you 'dissolve' the grouping of palettes (they call it a Palette Drawer). The one thing REALLY lacking that has been requested numerous times though is the ability to lock the palette arrangements. I constantly accidentally move them around with my stylus and they are difficult to re-group even using a mouse.

Lastly, the 'Advanced Brush Controls'. I think it was highlighted blue just to make it stand out when you opened it, and it's a bit of a special case because it dynamically updates. That grouping of palettes is your friend. The reason is, if you open it for a particular brush, all of the brush control palettes that have any control over your current brush are grouped together there. This prevents you from having to guess and open a zillion different palettes trying to find the functions that change your brush behavior. If it's a setting that works with your currently chosen brush, it'll appear in there. If it's one of the palettes that does nothing at all with your current brush, it won't show there. And, if you change your brush type entirely (e.g. from an Artist's Oils brush to a Real Watercolor brush), the Advanced Brush Controls auto-updates with again the relevant palettes for your chosen brush type. This is very helpful and was a great change they made to try to de-mystify the numerous brush types a bit.

I'm with you on Painter having numerous bugs, but some of these things I think are actually improvements compared to previous versions.

having all the controls that effect a brush collected in one menue is great and explains why you'll find multiple instances of the same controls.

i still think its unintuitive if one icon turns blue when toggled on while the other doesn't, fly out menues not applying the selected background color or stacking a lot of option tabs in one window but not adding a scrollbar so i can access them all without needing to colapse a few to shrink the window.

for me personly the brush control menues completely interfere with my workflow. if i have to make bigger adjustments to a brush i 100% change my focus on the menues and dedicate time to that task and once i'm satisfied with the result i'll save the variant and close the controls completely to safe space.

for that reason i think it would be better if you could load a dedicated window that has all the options effecting a brush at quick access + a seperate canvas where you can test the brush. maybe with a test picture or a copy of your current image and a button to clear the canvas - a environment that focuses only on the options and tools you need to tweak your brush.

with such a environment you'd safe a lot of time rearranging/searching windows cause they are in the way/off screen, searching a clean spot on your canvas or mistakenly exceed the number of undos while testing your brush and potentialy ruining the image you currently working on.

Yeah, I agree with you, but it really is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it is very distracting as you've described. On the other hand, the only reason I still use Painter is because I can make it do things that still no other program can do, because of its huge amount of adjustability and customizability. It is capable of some incredibly professional-looking results, but you have to have a very deep understanding of the program to get there.

Personally, I spend time once in a while just making brushes that do exactly what I want them to do, and don't bother trying to create art while I'm doing that. Then I put those into my own brush categories, and when I'm actually working on a painting I use the tools I've already built for myself, which already work exactly how I expect them to.

what you can do actually is pin the most important UI elements (say a color wheel, layer palette, opacity settings, and bleed/resaturation settings) to the sides of the screen, and assign a custom shortcut to the "hide screen palettes" command (I haven't used painter in quite some time so don't remember the exact command name, but you should be able to locate it under "window" menu; my shortcut key for that used to be "\") and keep all the brush panels expanded on screen at all times, but by hiding them during painting they won't interfere with your workflow.

for the brush testing - in clip studio paint, I just keep a separate small document and switch between two with cmd+tab command, it's lighting fast (which might be... not so fast in painter. I don't know.)

I don't think corel are capable of bringing what you describe as a test canvas panel in a way that won't crash painter, considering their current UI framework is even more limiting than the one they phased out. you can't use mixer palette in the same way it used to behave in painter X anymore, for example, and I assume anything that behaves as a document on top of a document will also be broken and never fixed if corel re-introduce this feature.

You're not going to find any disagreement here. I have Verve as well, and I have donated to Taron for its development. It's an amazing piece of software, and I have completed several paintings in it. I would use it exclusively if it were as fully-featured as Painter, but there are still certain limitations with it that prevent me from using it as my primary app.

Again, I don't want this to sound like I'm trying to defend Painter, but its new thick paint tools actually can look incredibly realistic. The problem is, all of the default brushes that come with it are crap. Really. Many of their 'brush technologies' can look pretty good, but their default setups (right down to the blank white non-textured canvas) look pretty bad.

Here is a more fair comparison (well, maybe not really 'fair', because the stock brushes that come with Painter will *not* look like this):

I should add, the default lighting settings for the canvas in Painter are also crap. If you know what you are doing though, and set up a proper multi-point lighting like you would use for photographing a painting, it can also look really good. In fact I think its old clunky lighting engine can look even better than ArtRage and maybe even Verve (because you can have multiple light sources at varying angles), but only if you know how to set it up and adjust it properly. Stock-for-stock without adjustments, ArtRage and Verve look much better in terms of lighting.